Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie To: Executive Staff and direct reports Date: October 28, 2010 From: Ray Ozzie Subject: Dawn of a New Day Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote The Internet Services Disruption in order to kick off a major change management process across the company. In the opening section of that memo, I noted that about every five years our industry experiences what appears to be an inflection point that results in great turbulence and change. In the wake of that memo, the last five years has been a time of great transformation for Microsoft. In the realm of the service-centric ‘seamless OS’ we’re well on the path to having Windows Live serve as an optional yet natural services complement to the Windows and Office software. And in the realm of what I referred to as our ‘services platform’, I couldn’t be more proud of what’s emerged as Windows Azure & SQL Azure. Our products are now more relevant than ever. The past five years have been breathtaking. Complexity kills. Ray
Technology - Alexis Madrigal - The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups. Finnish teenagers performing digital ennui in 1996 2006. Reuters. We're there. The future that visionaries imagined in the late 1990s of phones in our pockets and high-speed Internet in the air: Well, we're living in it. "The third generation of data and voice communications -- the convergence of mobile phones and the Internet, high-speed wireless data access, intelligent networks, and pervasive computing -- will shape how we work, shop, pay bills, flirt, keep appointments, conduct wars, keep up with our children, and write poetry in the next century." That's Steve Silberman reporting for Wired in 1999, which was 13 years ago, if you're keeping count. The question is, as it has always been: now what? Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." What we've seen since have been evolutionary improvements on the patterns established five years ago. That paradigm has run its course.
The Age Of Relevance Editor’s note: This is a guest post submitted by Mahendra Palsule, who has worked as an Editor at Techmeme since 2009. Apart from curating tech news, he likes analyzing trends in startups and the social web. He is based in Pune, India, and you can follow him on Twitter. What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking? This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload. The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time. Phase I: The Search Dominated Web This is how Google began its dominance over the web two decades ago, using PageRank to surface the most popular web pages as identified by other web pages that linked to them. Phase II: Web 2.0 With Social Bookmarking Phase IV: Personalized Serendipity
The Imminent Takeover of Web 3.0? Social media has literally started a revolution when it comes to advertising online or working on website promotion. There are so many affordable search engine optimization companies that can help you develop a killer social media plan that will help you establish ongoing communications with your customers, building your customer base and exploding your profits. The key is to balance out your regular SEO tactics with social media, and have the best of both worlds. The introduction, and seemingly imminent takeover, of social media is being referred to as Web 3.0. at first, Web 2.0 referred to the introduction of blogs, forums and such, which allowed the Internet user to be more present online and be more involved with marketing. Web 3.0 refers to the real time capabilities of people to connect with one another, through instant chat and other methods, which are readily available just about anywhere. Web 3.0 is not on the way, it is already here.
Google Reveals its Wildest Invention Ever - 'Project Glass' What do you get when you combine wearable glasses with Augmented reality? You get an amazing piece of technology by Google! Google has revealed ‘Project Glass’, its latest initiative for developing a wearable display glasses based on Augmented Reality. It is almost similar to what we’ve been seeing in movies for years, like Robocop. Augmented what? Augmented Reality is a technology that combines the physical real-world environment with interactive digital data providing you with information. There’s an interesting part in the video at 0:52 seconds where the character asks his glasses to remind him to book tickets for a show. Imagine a future – the glasses will display interactive information hovering in front of your eyes such as today’s weather when you look to the sky, new emails & messages when they arrive, video calls, voice commands and so more in front of your eyes as we had always imagined the future. Find more photos at Project Glass’s Google+ page.
Web 3.0 – what is it, how will it affect me and when will it arrive? As the web has developed, so have the buzzwords and terms that describe it. What feels like only yesterday, everyone was asking for a web 2.0 website, assuming that this instantly explained what they needed. What is actually described was a style of functionality that encouraged sharing and interaction. Although it wasn’t named as such, there was also a stage of web now referred to as web 1.0. The three ‘stages’ so far can be described as follows: Web 1.0 – Displaying and linking In the beginning the web was just a lot of content all independently hosted and occasionally linked together by hyperlinks. Web 2.0 – Social and Collaboration This is where we are now. Web 3.0 – Semantic Web This name was given to 3.0 by Tim Bernes-Lee who is said to have invented the web, but the concept around 3.0 was first covered in the media by Scientific American, a US publication in 2001. The definition of web 3.0 is still to be set as the technology that will dictate what it is has yet to be fine-tuned.
5 Computer Science Awards That Show Us The Future Of Technology They are not the Oscars or the Grammy’s. Heck, they aren’t even the Webbies or the Appy Awards for the man on the street. But just like the relatively obscure names you might have encountered in the list of 10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World, the computer science awards on this list are doing their own quiet bit to promote innovation and invention. In turn, the innovations and inventions are changing our future. We don’t realize it just yet. Of course, it can be argued that awards and honors always come after the event. IEEE Internet Award The Award: The IEEE Internet Award is a technical award given by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a worldwide (160 countries and 400,000 members) non-profit that promotes advancement of technology. The Impact: Mark Handley received the IEEE Internet Award this year for his contributions to Internet multicast, telephony, congestion control and the shaping of open Internet standards and open-source systems. IEEE Medal of Honor
Web 3.0 Just in case you missed it, the web now has version numbers. Nearly three years ago, amid continued hand-wringing over the dot-com crash, a man named Dale Dougherty dreamed up something called Web 2.0, and the idea soon took on a life of its own. In the beginning, it was little more than a rallying cry, a belief that the Internet would rise again. But as Dougherty's O'Reilly Media put together the first Web 2.0 Conference in late 2005, the term seemed to trumpet a particular kind of online revolution, a World Wide Web of the people. Web 2.0 came to describe almost any site, service, or technology that promoted sharing and collaboration right down to the Net's grass roots. Which raises the question: What will Web 3.0 look like? Yes, it's too early to say for sure. To many, Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web.
New spray-on batteries could revolutionize energy storage By Dakota Torres on 07/02/2012 Renewable energy has been one of the most researched topics ever since gas and oil prices have begun to rise and people have paid attention to their effects on the environment. Making your home run on renewable energy can be quite challenging and in some instances (very) expensive, but a research team at Rice University has just discovered a way to make it a lot easier to create energy and even store it. Imagine being able to take a bottle of substance and spray it on a wall of your house. The research, published last week in Nature, uses a new approach to the creation of batteries by using materials that can be spray-painted onto different types of surfaces. Conventional lithium-ion batteries feature a “jelly roll” structure which includes the anode, separator, cathode, and metal foils to collect the charge. Although this battery spray in theory could be adapted for personal hand-held spray cans, there is one limitation.